Four days after President Obama pledged to "protect and defend the Constitution," the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that he violated that oath in making several appointments last year.

The court said Obama's three "recess" appointments to the National Labor Relations Board weren't recess appointments at all, since the Senate was still in session when he made them.

Assuming the Supreme Court upholds the panel's ruling, all the decisions the board made over the past year will be nullified, since without those three there weren't enough members on the board to make any rulings at all.

The AP story called the decision an "embarrassing setback" for Obama.

But that assumes Obama has the capacity to be embarrassed in this regard at all. There's been little, if any, evidence of that throughout his first term.

In fact, from the moment he got the keys to the White House, Obama often talked as though the separation of powers embedded in the Constitution was little more than a problem to be overcome on his way to "fundamentally changing America."

At one point, he even groused about "this big, messy, tough democracy."

Worse, Obama often acted on that impulse, bypassing Congress at every turn when he didn't get his way.

Obama's many White House "czars," for example, were little more than an attempt to get his people in positions of power without having to work through the normal congressional vetting process.

When Congress defeated his union-backed "card check" ploy, Obama had his NLRB announce a "snap elections" rule to achieve the same goal of bolstering union organizing efforts.

Obama also unilaterally gutted the No Child Left Behind law by issuing waivers to any states that decided to follow his education reforms.

Then, despite clear language in the welfare reform law against waiving work requirements, Obama had his Health and Human Services agency do it anyway.

And when Congress failed to pass the Dream Act, Obama decided to enact much of it on his own, with an executive order telling officers not to deport certain classes of illegal immigrants.

Last fall, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor gathered these and many other examples together in a 33-page report titled "The Imperial Presidency."

Even the New York Times took notice of Obama's "increasingly deliberate pattern ... to circumvent lawmakers."

Given this record, his "recess" appointments to the NLRB should hardly seem surprising. After the Senate refused to confirm the appointments, Obama just declared the Senate out of session and made them anyway.

You might give Obama a bit of a break for his seeming indifference to our system of checks and balances, since his base is constantly egging him on to disregard it.

The New Republic's Timothy Noah, to cite just one example, this week offered up "eight ways" Obama can "jam through his agenda without Congress."

Obama's fellow Democrats recently urged him to ignore the law and unilaterally hike the debt ceiling. And now they are pushing Obama to run roughshod over Congress and enact his global warming agenda by fiat.

"Progress in Congress may be so difficult or protracted that you should not hesitate to act," several of them wrote Obama on Thursday.

This is the same crowd, mind you, that spent eight years decrying what they claimed were President Bush's imperialist tendencies.

Recently, House Speaker John Boehner complained that Obama wanted to "annihilate" the Republican Party.

With all due respect, after all these years, Boehner still doesn't get Obama. It's not just the GOP that Obama wants to get rid of, but anything and everything that stands in the way of his liberal Brave New World.

Thankfully, there are still some judges around who see the virtue of protecting and defending our "messy" system, even if Obama and his sycophants don't.

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